Picnic, Lightning
10 best books like Picnic, Lightning (Billy Collins): The Topeka School, The Dream Songs, A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, What the Bleep Do We Know!?: Discovering the Endless Possibilities for Altering Your Everyday Reality, The Way of Chuang Tzu (Shambhala Library), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Heart Sutra, Delights and Shadows, Blue Iris: Poems and Essays, The Hatred of Poetry
| Author | Ben Lerner |
| ISBN | 0374277788 |
From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the new right
Adam Gordon...
| Author | John Berryman |
| ISBN | 0374530661 |
This edition combines The Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969 and contains all 385 songs. Of The Dream Songs, A. Alvarez wrote in The Observer, "A major achievement. He has written an elegy on his...
| Author | Czesław Miłosz |
| ISBN | 0156005743 |
"A collection of 300 poems from writers around the world, selected and edited by Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz Czesław Miłosz's A Book of Luminous Things—his personal selection of poems from the past and present—is a testament to the stunning varieties of human experience, offered up so...
Gravity sometimes doesn't work.
Some things are both waves and particles. . .at the same time.
Electrons simply disappear . . . all the time. If the universe is this wild and unpredictable, so full of possibility, why are your thoughts about your own life so limited? Hundreds of years ago, science...
| Author | Zhuangzi |
| ISBN | 1590301439 |
Chuang Tzu—considered, along with Lao Tzu, one of the great figures of early Taoist thought—used parables and anecdotes, allegory and paradox, to illustrate that real happiness and freedom are found only in understanding the Tao or Way of nature, and dwelling in its unity. The respected Trappist...
| Author | Padmasambhava |
| ISBN | 0143104942 |
The first complete translation of a classic Buddhist text on the journey through living and dying. Graced with opening words by His Holiness The Dalai Lama, the Penguin Deluxe Edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is "immaculately rendered in an English both graceful and precise." Translated with...
| Author | Anonymous |
| ISBN | 1593760825 |
The short text of The Heart Sutra is Buddhism in a nutshell. It has had the most profound and wide-reaching influence of any text in Buddhism. Its full title, Prajna Paramita Hrdaya Sutra, "The Sutra of the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom," explains that this sutra contains the essence of the Buddha’s...
| Author | Ted Kooser |
| ISBN | 1556592019 |
American author Ted Kooser is a master of metaphor, a poet who deftly connects disparate elements of the world and communicates with absolute precision. Critics call him a "haiku-like imagist" and his poems have been compared to Chekov's short stories. In Delights and Shadows, Kooser draws inspiration...
| Author | Mary Oliver |
| ISBN | 0807068837 |
This is my favourite poem in the collection, not because it's the most exceptional poem, but because it's the poem that wound itself most firmly round my heart, and reminded me of the final days I spent with my grandmother, when she knew and I knew that she was dying, but she chose not to speak of it, but did...
| Author | Ben Lerner |
| ISBN | 0865478201 |
No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that...
